34. "I Have Bought a Farm": Worldly Excuses, the Great Supper, and Flight from the Holy Sacrifice

"And they began all at once to make excuse. The first said to him: I have bought a farm, and I must needs go out and see it; I pray thee hold me excused." - Luke 14:18

The parable of the great supper exposes something ugly in fallen man: he can be invited by God and still prefer an excuse. The invitation is noble, the host generous, the feast prepared, and yet farms, oxen, marriages, transactions, routines, and self-arranged obligations suddenly appear more urgent.

This reaches directly into the life of the Mass. Souls say they love the faith, yet the true altar is treated as secondary. Business, fatigue, distance, domestic pressure, convenience, social fear, and a thousand lesser things rise up as reasons to stay away. The point is not that every absence is sinful. God does not bind impossibilities. The point is that many men call inconvenience impossibility and preference necessity. They do not notice how much they reveal by what they will suffer for gladly and what they will not suffer for God.

That is why this matter is so serious. The excuse-makers in Luke 14 are not denied because farming, work, or marriage are evil. They are condemned because good created things were preferred to the divine invitation. Rev. Fr. Cornelius a Lapide and the Fathers see here the whole disorder of earthly attachment.[1]

The parable is severe because the invitation is real.[2] The supper is prepared. The servants are sent. The refusal is deliberate. Each man gives a reason that sounds lawful, measured, and socially acceptable. But the mask does not change the act. It is refusal.

This is why the excuses matter so much. A farm is not a sin. Oxen are not a sin. Marriage is not a sin. Yet each becomes sinful in this parable because each is put ahead of God's summons. The disorder lies not in the creature, but in the preference.

Rev. Fr. Cornelius a Lapide also preserves the deeper moral sense. The farm signifies earthly possession and absorption in temporal business. The oxen signify occupation with labor and the senses. The wife signifies lawful affection turned into pretext and delay.[3] The Fathers likewise see the parable unveiling the many ways men refuse heaven by clinging to earth.[4]

That is why the verse cuts so deeply into Mass-avoidance. The excuse need not be scandalous to be guilty. It only needs to be preferred. Men often imagine that because their reason sounds responsible, the refusal has become innocent. But the parable was built precisely from respectable reasons. Its terror lies there. The soul can answer God with something socially defensible and still be cold toward the feast.

See also Luke 14:16-24: The Great Supper, Worldly Excuses, and the Refusal of the Divine Invitation and Malachias 1:11: The Pure Oblation, Sacrifice Among the Nations, and the Mass of the New Covenant.

Catholic tradition never reads this parable as a polite warning about scheduling. It reads it as the exposure of a will that does not want God enough. The saints understood this. That is why they crossed danger, distance, weather, persecution, and inconvenience for the Mass. They knew that divine worship is not one duty among others. It is the center from which the rest of life must be ordered.

Rev. Fr. Cornelius a Lapide is especially useful because he does not sentimentalize the excuses. He reads them as images of avarice, worldly occupation, sensory attachment, and domestic pretext. St. Gregory the Great presses the same truth by reading the oxen as the five senses, dragging the soul outward.[5]

This is a needed rebuke for the age because modern men are very skilled at making refusal sound responsible. They do not say, "I do not care for God." They say, "I am too busy," "it is too far," "this season is complicated," "I have obligations," "the children make it hard," "another week will do." The form is respectable. The soul beneath it is often cold. This is why Catholic homes must learn to examine themselves honestly. What gets planned around the Mass, and what pushes the Mass out of the plan? That question often uncovers the heart more quickly than many long explanations.

The recusants, the Cristeros, the hidden Catholics of persecution, and the faithful of the catacombs did not live by easy access. They lived by hunger. They measured the Mass not by convenience but by worth. They arranged life around the altar whenever the altar could be reached.

This is why their witness judges us. They endured hardship to hear Mass because they knew what the Mass is. Men excuse themselves lightly only when they have lost the sense of sacrifice. Once the Mass is reduced in the mind to pious gathering, excuses multiply naturally. Once the Mass is known as the divine banquet and the Holy Sacrifice, excuses begin to look what they are: refusals.

The present crisis requires precision. There are times when access to the true Mass is materially impossible. A soul may be deprived through distance, danger, age, illness, persecution, or lack of available priest. God is not unjust. He does not command what cannot be done.

But there is another case, and it is common. The true Mass can be sought, at cost, and the soul prefers not to pay the cost. Here Luke 14 speaks directly. Many today would cross cities for entertainment, rearrange whole weeks for business, drive long hours for family events, and spend serious money for comfort. But let the true Mass require effort and suddenly everything becomes impossible.

The matter must therefore be called plainly. When the true Holy Sacrifice can be reached with real sacrifice, many souls reveal their loves by the excuses they make. Wolves benefit from that softness because every soul trained to treat the Mass as secondary is already halfway trained for counterfeit worship. The devil does not need men first to hate the Mass. It is enough if he can train them to rank it below almost everything else.

This is why the remnant must be ruthless with excuses in itself. If men wait until attendance costs nothing, they will soon accept any broad substitute that asks less of them. The man who prefers the farm to the true altar will eventually prefer the counterfeit altar to no altar at all. Soft excuses are not small. They prepare souls for religious betrayal.

The men in the parable were not rejected because they possessed farms, worked fields, examined oxen, or loved their wives. They were rejected because they preferred these things to the divine invitation. That is the warning.

The Mass is the great supper in sacramental and sacrificial truth. When God opens the way to His altar, the soul must learn to answer as a Catholic, not as an excuse-maker. Not every absence is contempt. But every convenient refusal should terrify us. Men usually lose the altar first in their loves before they lose it outwardly in their lives.

For the chapter that gathers priesthood, sacrifice, and divine worship back into a Roman whole, continue with From the Upper Room to Trent: The Unbroken Mass of the Church and the Nullity of Modernist Rites.